Seumas Milne: The opponents of war on Iraq are not the appeasers

The split at the heart of Nato over George Bush's plans to invade Iraq has triggered an outpouring of charges of 1930s-style appeasement against those resisting the rush to war. A line of attack hitherto largely confined to US neo-conservatives has now been taken up by their increasingly desperate fellow travellers on this side of the Atlantic.

On Tuesday, Jack Straw warned that if the west failed to use force against Iraq it would be following "one of the most catastrophic precedents in history", when Britain and France "turned a blind eye" to the fascist dictators' subversion of international law. Tony Blair alluded to the same period when he insisted that "all our history - especially British history" points to the lesson that if international demands are not backed up with force, the result is greater insecurity. Both were taking their cue from US hawks like Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed millions died in the 1940s because some countries had thought there wasn't "enough evidence" to be sure about Hitler's intentions.

Rightwing tabloids in both Britain and the US - where France and Germany's bid to avert war has aroused something close to political hysteria - have now gone even further in their determination to see the current crisis through a second world war prism. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post demanded to know: "Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers on the line to fight today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?" In Britain, the Daily Mail accused France and Germany of "unforgivable betrayal", while the Tory defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin declared that, without the US, "we would not have won the second world war".

Hitler analogies have long been the stock-in-trade of Anglo-American war propaganda - perhaps not surprisingly, since the second world war still retains near-universal legitimacy, just as Nazi Germany remains the archetype of an aggressive, genocidal state. Nasser was the first to be branded the new Hitler in the 1950s, while those who opposed the Suez war were damned as appeasers. But there have been a string of others, from Ho Chi Minh to Gaddafi, Milosevic to Mullah Omar. All were compared to Hitler while British or US bombs rained down on their countries. Just how devalued this currency has become was on show this week when the Tory historian Andrew Roberts argued that the Iraqi regime should be equated with the Nazis because both had "gassed their racial and political enemies" and Iraq fires at British and US aircraft patrolling the illegal no-fly zones over its territory.

It would be tempting to put these latest invocations of the second world war down to ignorance if it wasn't that those making them clearly know better. What they are in fact engaged in is a crude attempt to rewrite 20th century European history to justify a war of aggression in the Middle East. The parallel between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Nazi Germany is transparently ridiculous. In the late 1930s, Hitler's Germany was the world's second largest industrial economy and commanded its most powerful military machine. It openly espoused an ideology of territorial expansion, had annexed the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia in rapid succession and posed a direct threat to its neighbours. It would go on to enslave most of Europe and carry out an industrial genocide unparallelled in human history.

Iraq is, by contrast, a broken-backed developing country, with a single commodity economy and a devastated infrastructure, which doesn't even control all its own territory and has posed no credible threat to its neighbours, let alone Britain or the US, for more than a decade. Whatever residual chemical or biological weapons Iraq may retain, they are clearly no deterrent, its armed forces have been massively weakened and face the most powerful military force in history - Iraq's military spending is estimated to be about one per cent of the US's $380bn budget. The attempt to equate the Iraqis' horrific gas attacks on Kurds and Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war with the Nazi holocaust is particularly grotesque - a better analogy would be the British gassing of Iraqi Kurds in the 20s or the US use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.

Appeasement is in any case a misnomer for what was an attempt by rightwing governments in Britain and France in the 1930s to befriend Germany and accommodate Nazi expansion. There was certainly a widespread yearning for peace in the aftermath of the butchery of the first world war. But the appeasers were something else: effectively a pro-German fifth column at the heart of the conservative elite, who warmed to Hitler's militant anti-communism and sought to encourage him to turn on the Soviet Union. Chamberlain even hoped for an alliance with Nazi Germany. Fascist sympathies were rampant throughout the establishment, from Edward VIII to newspapers like the Mail which now denounce opponents of war on Iraq as traitors - while mavericks like Churchill and what would now be called the hard left resisted the Munich sellout. In none of this is there the remotest analogy with current efforts to prevent an unprovoked attack on sanctions-drained Iraq. And of course none of the opponents of appeasement in the 1930s ever argued for pre-emptive war on Nazi Germany, but for deterrence and self-defence.

Just as absurd, against the background of the European-US standoff, is the increasingly strident insistence of the war party that it was the US which saved Europe from Nazi tyranny in the 1940s. It isn't necessary in any way to minimise the heroism of US soldiers to balk at such a retrospective reworking of the facts. Quite what the Russians - who lost perhaps 27 million people in the second world war (compared with 135,576 US deaths in Europe), bore the brunt of the European fighting and, in Churchill's words, "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine" - are supposed to make of this fable is anyone's guess. Particularly when Russia - along with France, Germany and China - is opposing the current war drive and is presumably therefore regarded by war supporters as ranked among the appeasers.

The idea that those opposed to US aggression against Iraq can be compared to the appeasers of the 1930s is simply risible. But if appeasement - unlike the form it took in the 1930s - is regarded as an attempt to pacify a powerful and potentially dangerous power, it sounds far more like the behaviour of Tony Blair's government towards the Bush administration. Of course Bush's America cannot be compared with Nazi Germany - it is far more in the traditional imperial mould. But Britain's apparent attempt to steer the US away from unilateral action, if that is what it has been, shows every sign of failing. Instead, Blair has ended up lining up behind a hard-right US republican administration with the political heirs of Mussolini and Franco in the teeth of British and global opinion - and helped to fracture the US-dominated post-1991 global order into the bargain.